Its zucchini time in our garden right now and since I always love to make seasonal recipes and use the fruit and veggies that are currently ripe and ready for my recipes I came up with this amazing low carb dish for you!

I am sure many of you have heard of zucchini noodles and you might think that you need to buy a special spiralizer for it. No need my friend. In this blogpost I will show you how easily you can make your own zucchini noodles just buy using your regular kitchen utensils.

Why I love vegetable pasta

I am always looking for ways to replace simple carbs like pasta with a better gluten free and low carb substitute. Making pasta out of vegetable is simply a genius invention and zucchinis are perfect for it. Using zucchini as your base you will be saving so many calories and carbs from a meal, but still get the full taste and pasta experience in my opinion.

How to make Zucchini Linguine

What you need to do first is wash your zucchini and dry them up. Then use a normal vegetable peeler and peel thin slices from the zucchini. Like this you will get your Linguine.
Then you will need to boil them in hot water for just 3-4 minutes, so they wont get too soft. It really isn’t that much more work than making regular pasta. You will see! 🙂

Regarding the sauce for your zucchini linguine you can let your creativity run free. I used low fat cream cheese (which I put in after I took the photo – doesn’t look so pretty mixed up with the cream cheese) and then just threw some fun veggies in there. I topped it off with feta cheese dices.

The recipe

1 big zucchini

40g feta cheese

5 cherry tomatoes

2 tbsp low fat cream cheese

salt & pepper

With a vegetable peeler carefully peel thin slices off the zucchini. Boil them in salt water for 3 minutes and strain well. Put them back into the pot and mix in the cream cheese, salt and pepper. Cut the feta cheese into small dices and mix under the zucchini pasta. Put on a plate and decorate with small cherry tomatoes.

Enjoy! 🙂

I hope you enjoyed this light summery low carb pasta creation and will try making it yourself soon. Btw, have you seen my healthy low carb salads? No?! Well then, click here!

Celebrating Summer

What I love most about the summer is the wonderful barbecue season! It is so easy to eat healthy and not miss out on the tasty barbecue goods. You guys asked me to make more savory recipes, therefore I would like to share two of my new go-to low carb barbecue recipes with you.

I discovered shrimps to be the ultimate hit regarding the perfect summer barbecue. So, I experimented a bit with different shrimp variations, also pairing it up with pineapple in my second recipe.

May this summer celebrate slow, delicious, lazy days and simplified living. Let’s read long books, stay up late drinking wine with friends and stroll our local farmers markets, slowing life down enough to taste its sweetness. Here is to backyard bungalow get-togethers, shrimp barbecues, long sunsets, beach picnics and getting back to nature!

Method: Cut the sweet potato in rectangular fries and place in a bowl. Marinate with olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme, marjoram and rosemary. Put aside. Place the shrimp into another bowl and marinate the same way. Put the garlic clove into a press and mix with the greek yoghurt and some salt. Put aside. Put the the shrimp onto wooden skewers and place them together with the sweet potatoes on the barbecue grill. Wait until the have the typical barbecue pattern and are done. In a bowl spiralize the cucumber and marinate with olive oil, balsamic, salt & pepper. Put into a nice bowl and decorate with cocktail tomatoes, half an avocado (sprinkled with sesame or chia seeds). Now place some of the sweet potato fries and greek yoghurt mix on it. Finally top with two shrimp skewers and serve while still warm.

Pineapple Barbecue Shrimp Skewers

Okay I admit this is a crazy creation I very spontaneously made up when I had leftover pineapple sitting in my fridge. Usually I am not the biggest fan of combining sweet and sour taste into one dish, but this one is actually pretty great and I was surprised myself!

Ingredients:

200g pineapple

100g shrimp

100ml water

1 tbsp of honey

pinch of salt

1 lemon

some rosemary

wooden skewers

Method:

Cut the pineapple into nice rectangular pieces. Dissolve the honey with some water and at the juice of a lemon. Add a pinch of salt. Let the shrimp and pineapple soak in it for about 15 minutes. Take some wooden skewers and put alternating pineapple and shrimp on it. Place skewers onto a barbecue grill until well done on both sides. Cut rosemary into small pieces and sprinkle over the skewers. Serve while still warm.

I hope you enjoyed these recipes 🙂 For the perfect side salads check out this blogpost here. Also, here is my dessert suggestion to round up the night. For more recipe you can also check my Youtube channel.

I absolutely love summer for being able to eat the most amazing and creative salad creations. It is just so refreshing and healthy! Lately I have been experimenting with cucumbers, as I feel like their neutral taste lets them mix perfectly with all kinds of different things. Thats why I came up with this delicious cucumber summer salad!

In this blog post you will find two of my new and favorite cucumber salad creations. They are both so extremely easy and fast to make, look beautiful and taste delicious.

Cucumber Summer Salad

I found feta cheese to harmonize perfectly with the subtle sweet cucumber taste. This creation is the perfect summer salad and the perfect addition to every lunch and dinner meal. All you need is a cucumber, some feta and tomatoes. I used a spiralizer to make cucumber pasta – works amazingly well!

Make sure to let the cucumber noodles sit for 15 minutes because they will loose a lot of water. Drain the noodles and mix them with tomatoes and feta.

Cucumber Melon Salad

The second cucumber salad variation is very similar to the first one. The only difference this time is that I replaced the tomatoes with watermelon. I found this combination of sweet watermelon and tart feta cheese to taste extremely delicious. This is really the perfect summer salad with its tropical vibes and sweet taste.

Now with the barbecue season this is really the perfect side dish to impress your friends with! Definitely something different and I think they would love it. So make sure to give it a try!

Again all I did was mix 1 cucumber with 50g of Feta cheese and 100g of watermelon. Dressing was: white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper.

I hope you enjoyed these light summery cucumber creations and will try making them yourself soon.

Today I would like to share one of my favorite low carb recipes with you. Let’s make some low carb filled zucchini – perfect for your fitness diet!

This is super easy and fast to make, doesn’t have a lot of calories and is perfect if you are on a low carb diet. I was even eating this while I was on my ketogenic diet. It will provide you with clean protein and good fiber through the zucchini.

I like to fill zucchinis but you can also use sweet potatoes, pumpkin, peppers or whatever veggie comes to your mind. Lately I have been seeing those awesome round zucchinis. They look so cute and are the perfect size.

What I also like about this recipe is that you really don’t need a lot of ingredients or time to make it. You literally just throw everything together in a bowl and fill the zucchinis with it.

Since I am currently on a keto diet, which is a very extreme form of a low carb diet, I wanted to share one of my favorite sweet recipes with you. When you are on keto it is seems to be quite hard to still satisfy your sweet tooth, however, with these delicious low carb keto bounty bars you won’t even miss the real sugar! <3

My take on a keto diet

Being on a low carb diet can be quite tricky. Especially when you are trying to eat something sweet. On a ketogenic diet especially you have to cut out most of your carbs and replace them with fats. These tasty keto bounty bars will provide you with a good amount of healthy fats from the coconut. Your nutrition intake should be somewhere between eating 60-70% fat each day. Research says proteins should take up 25% and carbs only 5%.

The longest I have been on a keto diet was for 5 weeks. It has helped me tremendously to fix a bacterial problem I had in my stomach as the bacteria was survived by eating carb. Once I cut out all the carbs I was able to starve the harmful bacteria and was fine again. So a keto diet can actually have great health benefits. I would not suggest this diet to be your general way of eating though. I find it to extreme and at some point I believe your body will be missing valuable nutrients you get from eating fresh fruit for example.

How to make keto bounty bars

So, this is another really easy recipe. As you know my recipes usually don’t take longer than 15 minutes and this also a really quick one – no cooking skills required!

First you start out by making the filling. Simply put all ingredients together and mix well until you get a crumbly mixture. It should be moist and stick together. Shape the filling into little bar shapes and place them on a baking sheet. Let them harden in the fridge for 2 hours. They should be really cold when you take them out! You can even put the keto bounty bars in the freezer for a bit so they will harden faster.

The next step is to make the chocolate coating. The darker your chocolate is the less carbs you will have. Of course a 99% dark chocolate also tastes bitter. I usually shoot somewhere between 75 and 80%.

Melt the chocolate in a medium heat proof bowl. I usually do it in the microwave because it is faster, but if you want to do it the proper way then melt it over the steam of boiling water or at 45 degrees in the oven. I like to add a bit of coconut oil to my coating so it is easier to distribute over the keto bounty bars and also hardens better after.

Take out the cold bars from the fridge or freezer and dip them into the chocolate. Let the superfluous chocolate drip off the bars and gently place them on the baking sheet again. If you want you can sprinkle them with coconut flakes now. Best you let them cool in the fridge again for another hour.

You see how easy this recipe is. Done are your easy keto bounty bars. 🙂 I hope you will try this low carb recipe soon!

Put the coconut flakes into the over at 180 degrees for about 7 minutes until they turn golden.

Put them into a bowl and stir liquid coconut oil, Philadelphia cream cheese, whey protein and the Flavdrops in. Now form little bars and put them on a baking sheet.

Put them into the fridge for half an hour.

Melt the chocolate with the extra coconut oil. Pour chocolate over the bars and sprinkle with more coconut flakes. Now cool them again in the fridge.

Notes

Nutrition values for 1 bar: 120kcal, 35g fat, 2g carbs, 15g protein

carinaberry.com https://carinaberry.com/

I hope you enjoyed this easy recipe. You can store them in the fridge for like a week and always have a low carb snack at hand! Check out my super clean protein Rafaello snack recipe too. I am sure you would love it!

And did you know I am also on YouTube? I am sharing tons of helpful food blogger advice there and show you some of my favorite recipes as well!